Effect of disorder in MgB2 thin films -: art. no. 214502

We report on scanning tunneling spectroscopy studies of magnesium diboride (MgB2) thin films grown by different techniques. The films have critical temperatures ranging between 28 and 41 K with very different upper critical fields. We find that the superconducting gap associated with the sigma band decreases almost linearly with decreasing critical temperature while the gap associated with the pi band is only very weakly affected in the range of critical temperatures above 30 K. In the sample with the lowest critical temperature (28 K) we observe a small increase of the pi gap that can only be explained in terms of an increase in the interband scattering. The tunneling data was analyzed in the framework of the two-band model. The magnetic-field-dependent tunneling spectra and the upper critical field measurements of these disordered samples can be consistently explained in terms of an increase of disorder that mostly affects the pi band in samples with reduced critical temperatures.